lynda
Auton Daisy
Posts: 480
|
Post by lynda on Nov 20, 2008 3:07:43 GMT
One of my roommates and I were at the city offices today to pay our utilities bill and decided to visit the city library and get library cards. I'd never been to that library because I always go to the university one. Anyways, we went there and there were lots of British movies! Including lots of classic Who. I got a Mr. Bean video and let said roommate pick out a Doctor Who. She picked Vengeance on Varos. We're going to watch Mr. Bean tonight and VoV soon, and then I'll review it here.
|
|
|
Post by Stripes on Nov 20, 2008 3:14:53 GMT
You have the best library ever. Toronto has ALOT of who in books though you can't take them out .... most of them anyway.
|
|
|
Post by clocketpatch on Nov 20, 2008 3:25:09 GMT
I find it odd that you aren't allowed to take out the Who books. Do people steal them or something???
|
|
|
Post by Stripes on Nov 20, 2008 3:37:20 GMT
I find it odd that you aren't allowed to take out the Who books. Do people steal them or something??? They are stacked at the referance library, which is the biggest library in Toronto or something. They are in safe hands at Merril library. All science fiction/fantsy etc in one library. So Merril is like the referance library only for books like Doctor Who. They hold books that are hard to find, one copy or very old books. WHO apply to all three. They even have some audio plays you can listen to there. I believe you can take out NEWWHO books and the DVDs of the new series is in order. We also have OLDwho on VHS that you can take out. They must be pretty beaten up though.
|
|
lynda
Auton Daisy
Posts: 480
|
Post by lynda on Nov 24, 2008 15:18:32 GMT
So on Saturday night we watched this. Roommate 1, who picked it out and who has seen most of season three, roommate 2 who had really liked watching Mr. Bean and so wanted to see what else we had picked out, a guy friend of ours that we convinced to come because he thought the name Doctor Who sounded funny, and me.
Guy friend and roommate 2 spent most of the serial arguing whether or not Sil, or the worm dude as we called him, was standing behind the pedestal thing or just played by a really short actor. This was interspersed with comments about the fashions of the 80s and laughing whenever the Fake Lasers of Doom or the Pimped Out Go-Kart showed up. Towards the end, they got into an argument on whether or not getting covered in bird feathers is scary or not. Oh, and roommate 1 told Peri to put some clothes on and grow some brains whenever she appeared.
That pretty much sums up the story. Really. It was really funny, though. I'm not sure if that was the effect it was going for or not.
Afterwards, roommate 1 kept telling the two over and over again that they couldn't judge Doctor Who by this, they had to watch some more so that they could see that most of it was a lot better. She said this all on her own; I'm so proud of her. So we get to watch some more Who this week. I'm not sure if it'll be season three or if we'll go get another classic serial from the library.
|
|
|
Post by jjpor on Nov 25, 2008 20:25:28 GMT
Don't want to keep harping on about my distant childhood ("aye, when I were a lad, this were all fields..."), but Vengeance on Varos scared the living daylights out of me as a youngster - Sil terrified me; the whole turning-into-a-bird bit terrified me. People talk about hiding behind the sofa, but that was the one time it was literally true in my case. Shockeye eating that rat in the Two Doctors, by contrast, rather amused me, I seem to remember. The guy's head inside the glass Dalek casing in Revelation, while certainly icky, didn't provoke the same sort of response in me. I can sort of see where some of the people who said it was too scary for kids were coming from, but only sort of; after all, it never did me any harm (much)!
|
|
|
Post by magnusgreel on Dec 3, 2008 11:30:34 GMT
I think VoV had a good idea underlying it. There were clumsy aspects typical of that time of DW though, which almost ruin it. The Six personality was disturbing, often consisting of overblown goofiness in response to tragedies, making him seem weirdly callous. Six/Peri conversations don't seem like real conversations somehow... they're awkward and forced, and staged, strangely phrased and acted, though it may not be the actors' fault. Maybe no actor could sound natural doing those lines.
The bird thing was silly, at least to me. Sil was a sort of 'clone' of the Usurian in Sun Makers. They had a habit at this point of dressing up little BBC motorized carts (presumably), used for getting around on the set I'm guessing, as alien vehicles.
|
|
|
Post by jjpor on Dec 3, 2008 21:41:20 GMT
The bird thing was silly, at least to me. To be clear, I was about six and a half years old at the time that I found it terrifying! Other things that I found terrifying on television at about that age were Jon Pertwee as Worzel Gummidge and Lou Ferrigno as the Incredible Hulk. What can I say, I was a highly-strung child. ;D Agreed on some of your above comments - there was something weirdly off-kilter about Six and his relationship with Peri which I don't think can really be blamed on the actors. Killing people, as he does here, even if he doesn't dirty his own hands, and then making flippant remarks about it does not become the good Doctor. I can only imagine what they must have been thinking when they made it. Still, there are some good points; there is a basically good premise trying to get out of the mess. I quite like Sil, even if he isn't original. And Martin Jarvis (best-known over here as a smarmy guest panelist on gameshows rather than for his acting career) is pretty good as the spineless Governor.
|
|
|
Post by magnusgreel on Dec 4, 2008 0:46:12 GMT
I think they probably thought, the Doctor is so well-known and established as a character that it's time to play around with it a bit, at least temporarily sending him into a semi-psychotic direction, in an attempt to be a bit daring. I think they must have planned to show him gradually coming out of it. It's a sort of variation on the idea of a darker Doctor, like Seven and Nine.
All this rested on the assumption that DW was so firmly established that it was here to stay, and therefore that they had the freedom to risk alienating some of the audience, knowing that they could count on large numbers of guaranteed viewers to stick with them through this rough patch.
I suppose it may have made sense at the time. DW had been around forever on British television, so much so that it was taken for granted, even by JNT as it turned out.
|
|